At Casablanca in January 1943, President Roosevelt, somewhat to
the surprise of his conference partner, Prime Minister Winston S.
Churchill, pronounced unconditional surrender to be the goal of
American and British military operations against the Axis Powers.
Although the announcement itself was apparently made, as he said
later, on the spur of the moment, Roosevelt had discussed the idea
of unconditional surrender with the joint Chiefs of Staff early in
January. At the time, he had conceived it as being primarily a way
to reassure Soviet Marshal Joseph V. Stalin about the Western
Powers' determination to carry the war against Germany through to
the finish. Not thinking yet of a public announcement Roosevelt had
proposed sending General Marshall to Moscow to inform Stalin that
"the United Nations will continue until they reach Berlin and that
their only terms are unconditional surrender."
1Quite obviously,
although he later included Italy and Japan in the formula, Germany
was from the first uppermost in the President's mind. For the
moment, his chief concern was probably maintaining the East-West coalition
through the fighting still ahead; lout he had also, whether
intentionally or not, laid the groundwork for the eventual Allied
occupation of Germany. Very likely, since the failure to bring home
to the Germans the full extent of their defeat was considered a
major mistake of World War I, some kind of supervision would have
been imposed on Germany in any case. The demand for unconditional
surrender made this likelihood a certainty; moreover, given the
character of Hitler's government, the demand meant that the war
and, in its wake, Allied military government would be carried into
the heart of Germany.

When the President and Prime Minister met at Casablanca,
however, the Nazi Wehrmacht was deep in the Soviet Union, and
neither the Russians nor the Western Allies were in a position to
threaten Germany directly in the near future. The Americans and the
British had agreed in principle in April 1942 on Operation ROUNDUP,
a cross-Channel invasion to he executed in the spring of 1943; but
ROUNDUP had given way to the North African invasion. At Casablanca
the Mediterranean strategy won out again, at least as far as Sicily
was concerned. The march on Germany would not begin in 1943. The
staffs, however, became all the more determined that it should then
start in 1944, and the conference agreed to establish in England a
combined planning staff for a

[23]

cross-Channel attack in 1944. The chief of staff would be
British; the supreme commander would be selected later.2The
decision to revive the planning for a cross-Channel attack had the
growing American influence and power behind it, and before the year
was out it would come to dominate the planning for the war in
western Europe. Germany would become the target of military
operations and, inevitably, also of military government.

In previous wars U.S. military government had always been a
field operation carried out with minimum direction from Army
headquarters. In World War II, War Department and General Staff
interest assured central control; nevertheless, in this war too the
field organizations emerged and to a substantial extent evolved
independently of the Washington headquarters. The Army's first
tactical civil affairs section in fact antedated all lout the
vaguest glimmerings of concern for military government in the Army
Staff. On 31 December 1941, V Corps (Reinforced) under Maj. Gen.
Edmund L. Daley, then stationed at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana,
received orders to prepare for shipment overseas. FM 27-5 specified
the creation of a civil affairs section in corps and higher staffs
operating outside the United States, and on 4 February 1942, Col.
Arthur B. Wade was named Civil Affairs Officer, V Corps. No
similar staff section existed or had existed since the early 1920s
in the Army. Working from FM 27-5 and The Hunt Report, Colonel Wade developed a V Corps civil affairs plan which established
the section's main function as being to foster and maintain
harmonious relations between the military force and civilian
populations in either friendly or occupied enemy territory. V Corps
shipped out from Fort Dix, New Jersey, on 29 April 1942 and arrived
in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 12 May.3 The Army thus had a civil
affairs section in being in an overseas theater one day after the
first class assembled at Charlottesville.

On 8 June, Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, US Army (ETOUSA),
assumed command of all US Army forces in Europe. ETOUSA had two commanders in
its first month: initially Maj. Gen. James E. Chaney, then General Dwight D.
Eisenhower.

ETOUSA was slower to recognize the need for a civil affairs
section than V Corps had been. V Corps had been formed in the
United States to perform an indefinite mission; ETOUSA came into
being in London, and if its mission was considerably less than
precise, it knew that it would be engaged primarily in assembling
American forces in the British Isles. This mission did not seem to
establish a compelling requirement for a civil affairs section.

When a British group, the Administration of Territories (Europe) Committee-began
meeting in July to deal with civil affairs subjects relating to the planning
for ROUNDUP, ETOUSA sent the theater's judge advocate general, Col. Edward C;.
Betts, as US observer. Colonel Betts was impressed by the serious interest the
British civilians and military on the AT (E) Committee showed in occupation
problems, and at the end of the month he recommended appointment of a civil
affairs officer for

[24]

ETOUSA. On 5 August, Colonel Wade was transferred from V Corps
to act as the temporary civil affairs officer for ETOUSA and to
become, a few days later, the first and, for the moment, only
member of a newly created ETOUSA civil affairs section. By then the
AT (E) Committee had progressed to the appointment of a Deputy
Chief Civil Affairs Officer (DCCAO) to take charge of the military
planning for civil affairs, and on 10 August in a letter to
Washington, Eisenhower asked for a qualified colonel whom he could
appoint as a counterpart to the British DCCAO.4

By August, however, ROUNDUP had given way to TORCH, the North African invasion,
and ETOUSA's future mission, if any, was becoming more nebulous. Colonels Betts
and Wade continued to sit as observers on the AT (E) Committee, but a DCCAO
was not appointed. As trained civil affairs officers from the first course at
Charlottesville began to arrive in the theater, they were assigned to the British
civil defense regions, where they maintained liaison between the regional commissioners
and the US troops. Scattered across England, the Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA,
could not begin to perform any staff functions at all until after mid-January
1943 when seven officers, four of them recent Charlottesville graduates, were
finally assembled at headquarters. This group, however, after working out a
study for a military government operation in an indeterminate area of northwestern
Europe, found it had exhausted its resources and the staff's interest as well
and subsided into collecting library materials. In early 1943 the Civil Affairs
Section had no coherent organization and no mission other than general instructions
to follow the principles of FM 27-5.5

In the spring of 1943, after the Casablanca Conference, civil
affairs at ETOUSA began to show signs of renewed life and purpose.
The emergence of the Civil Affairs Division in Washington lent an
inevitable prestige to civil affairs Army-wide that it had not had
before; and the beginning of British War Office negotiations with
the Dutch and Belgian exile governments and the Free French on the
administration of liberated territory increased the possibility of
ETOUSA's opening negotiations too. In the third week of March,
civil affairs finally emerged, on paper at least, as a full-fledged
staff section with a chief civil affairs officer and more branches
in its table of organization than it had qualified officers to
fill.6 Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews, then commanding ETOUSA, asked for
more officers and for a chief who had "substance," preferably
General Wickersham, the commandant at Charlottesville, and declared
that ETOUSA needed the strongest possible civil affairs section
since in the long run all theaters would be secondary to the
European Theater of Operations (ETO).7 ETOUSA would get more and
more officers lout never the grand mission it was beginning to see
in the making.

In April a new staff appeared. Lt. Gen.
Frederick E. Morgan,
as Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), began
forming a combined British-American staff to start the cross-

[25]

Channel invasion planning provided for at Casablanca. General
Morgan was assumed to be serving as the stand-in for a supreme
commander yet to be appointed, who would be British. Maj. Gen. Ray
W. Barker, as the first in a stream of officers from ETOUSA, moved
over to the COSSAC staff to become Morgan's deputy.

Although General Morgan appeared at first to be building primary
a British staff with an interlarding of American officers on
detached duty from their main headquarters, ETOUSA, his appointment
marked the true beginning of operational civil affairs-military
government preparations, American as well as British. Until then
civil affairs-military government had possessed only a nebulous
staff function and practically no definable mission; COSSAC was
able to supply both. While he was not actually told so, Morgan
could and did assume that his was not just a planning staff but was
also the nucleus for the staff that would eventually direct the
assault on Germany. His chief mission was to draft the plan, first
named ROUNDHAMMER and later OVERLORD, for the projected 1944
invasion of the Continent. His responsibility did not end there,
however; he was also to plan for a possible German collapse or
partial collapse at any time before the spring of 1944.8 The latter
contingency made not only the planning but also the execution of
civil affairs and military government major concerns of COSSAC.

While the terms of Morgan's mission suggested the need for
military government, one of his early conclusions as COSSAC was
that no such capability existed. At the end of May, uncertain even
where the ultimate responsibility lay, he reported an urgent
requirement for a civil affairs headquarters and an operating organization equipped with a coherent
body of policy procedure.9 The TRIDENT Conference, held in
Washington earlier in the month, had given COSSAC a target date, 1
May 1944, and some specific figures on forces. Morgan apparently
assumed the civil affairs organization would be formed separately
from the military command, which seemed to be in keeping with
American and British thinking, but, as was to happen repeatedly in
the future, his request foundered in turmoil and uncertainty at the
higher command levels. On the American side the argument over
civilian versus military control was still so far from settled that
the War Department could not have ventured a decision.
Consequently, what was decided emerged piecemeal in the wake of
events, the product of necessity more than of policy.

In July, with no decision yet on a separate organization or on a
branch within COSSAC-which General Morgan proposed in June-civil
affairs suddenly moved into the foreground of COSSAC's planning.
Within days of each other, came the landing in Sicily and the
failure of the German offensive against the Kursk salient in
Russia. Henceforth the Axis would be on the defensive in the East
and the West. Germany's condition appeared strikingly like that of
July 1918 when Ludendorff's Friedenssturm halted and Germany went
from near victory to complete defeat in less than four months.

Before the end of July, COSSAC had orders to give first priority
to the planning for a return to the Continent in the event of a
partial or complete German collapse. Since he was to anticipate
such a contingency any time after 1 August, his staff

[26]

would also have to be prepared to act as the executive agency for any operation
that might ensue. Morgan now found himself with an urgent task and still no
civil affairs staff. Meetings in June and July between COSSAC and ETOUSA representatives
had produced agreement that he ought to have some such staff to procure uniformity
in US and British dealings with civilian populations; but the final authority,
to the extent that it existed, remained vested in and divided between the Civil
Affairs Section, ETOUSA, and the Civil Affairs Directorate of the British War
Office.10

On 28 July, in letters to the Under Secretary of State, War Office, and Headquarters,
ETOUSA, Morgan proposed a combined civil affairs section within the COSSAC staff
and urged its early establishment. His mission, he explained, required him to
enter and take control on short notice in any of a half dozen countries, including
Germany. Whether he might have to assume such control next month or next year
he could not tell, but at the moment he could not do it at all. He asked for
US and British section chiefs to he appointed immediately. They would head a
central executive, to be concerned with high policy, and a co-ordinating section,
which would supervise groups charged with planning for specific countries.11

The COSSAC staff, meanwhile, worked on the various possibilities
of a return to the Continent before the appointed date for
OVERLORD. The staff took its guidance from a high-level British
intelligence estimate which described the German situation at the
end of July as "verging on the desperate" and predicted that in the
coming winter Germany could suffer "an overwhelming defeat and irretrievable disaster on the Russian
front."
12 Whoever was then in control in Germany, the
estimate continued, would have to decide between unconditional
surrender or abandonment of the occupied territories in western and
southern Europe in order to concentrate forces against the Russian
advance, postpone the hour of final defeat, and ensure the ultimate
occupation of Germany by Anglo-American rather than by Russian
forces.13

From this rather blatantly optimistic estimate, the COSSAC
planners deduced three so-called cases to which they assigned the
collective code name RANKIN. Cases A and B were concerned with the
prospect of an invasion before 1 May 1944, the target date for
OVERLORD, to exploit a drastic German weakening in France and the
Low Countries or a voluntary German withdrawal. Morgan especially
remembered how unprepared the Allies had been in early 1917 for the
German withdrawal to the early Line. Case C dealt with the
possibility of an unconditional German surrender.14

Were it not for case C, the whole RANKIN plan could lie
dismissed as only one more of the waves of wishful thinking that
had periodically swept over the Western Allies since the beginning
of the war. Case C, however, marked a new high in optimism and
therewith added another aspect to the planning. While the first two
cases could lie handled as variations of OVERLORD, RANKIN C was
concerned with the end of the war, the beginning of

[27]

the occupation, and the reorientation of effort into directions
which so far had not even been defined, much less explored.
Moreover, even if such a situation did not become a reality in the
near future, it was likely to arise sometime and perhaps suddenly.
When it did, COSSAC pointed out, combat forces might well be less
useful than the ability to control and direct civil affairs. Morgan
therefore requested that the British and United States governments,
"as a matter of urgency," lay down policy on military government in
enemy territory and civil affairs in liberated territory and
provide resources with which to execute such policy. As of August
1943, he pointed out, he had nothing from which even to improvise a
civil affairs organization.15

In RANKIN C, General Morgan had proposed an operation for which
he had no staff to do the detailed planning, no organization to
execute any plans that might lie made, and no policy direction on
which to base plans in the first place. The first two and a
reasonable substitute for the last would be found because they had
to be found, but not without their appropriate measures of
administrative agony. Without waiting for action elsewhere, Morgan,
in August, took in hand the organizing of a civil affairs section
for COSSAC. Where once the European theater had no civil affairs
planning staff, it would soon have two, which would prove to lie
one too many.

On 23 August, COSSAC established a civil affairs section under
Maj. Gen. Sir Roger Lumley. The COSSAC section consisted of a central
organization which would lie concerned with operational planning
for OVERLORD and the RANKIN operations and a planning board to
direct the work of four "country houses," one each for France,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway. The country houses would
provide the nucleus civil affairs staffs for their assigned areas.
No staff was created for Germany because COSSAC assumed that the
United States and Britain would handle the occupation of Germany
separately.16 ETOUSA assigned twenty officers to the Civil Affairs Section,
COSSAC, leaving twenty-three officers in its own civil affairs
section.17

In August, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, commanding ETOUSA, named
Col. Cornelius E. Ryan the acting chief of the U.S. Civil Affairs
Staff, COSSAC.18Ryan was at the same time chief of the ETOUSA Civil
Affairs Section, having replaced Wade a month earlier. In July,
after nearly a year in limbo, the Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA,
had finally found a firm billet in the special staff. At the end of
the month it had established a table of organization consisting of
four planning branches-civilian relief, military government,
economics, and personnel and training-and a fifth branch-area
research-which was conceived as having an operating as well as a
planning function since it would be concerned with areas to lie
occupied, including Germany.19The section's directive gave it

[28]

responsibility for planning military government
in all enemy and enemy-occupied areas in the European theater,
authority to recommend general and specific policies for military
government, and control of civilian supplies and civil affairs
personnel.20

The question then was on which of the two sections would the mantle of responsibility
eventually fall. The Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA, assumed that COSSAC, when
it became an active command, would be predominantly British with a British commander
and Americans in the minority on the staff. ETOUSA would then still have to
represent the War Department in the European theater and at least control the
supplies, training, and transportation of American forces in the theater. The
ETOUSA section was particularly emphatic on the score of representing the US
interest in the combined planning. The British side of COSSAC, the Civil Affairs
Section maintained, was already seeking to dominate the planning by drawing
on the resources of British governmental agencies, which it had close at hand,
and by presenting the Americans with faits accompli in the form of papers
on important and complicated subjects on which British experts outside the COSSAC
staff had obviously worked for months. The Americans were expected either to
come forward on short notice with something better or to accept the British
position. ETOUSA, the Civil Affairs Section urged, should therefore be invited
by the British to observe all preliminary conferences and negotiations; should
be the channel of communication from the Civil Affairs Division, War Department,
to the US element in COSSAC; and should review all plans, directives, and agreements
put out by COSSAC.

The position of the Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA, however,
seemed bound to become completely precarious if COSSAC became a
full-fledged combined command. As Maj. E. R. Baltzell, who had
been ETOUSA's civil affairs liaison officer with COSSAC, predicted,
once the Supreme Commander was appointed he would have full
authority in planning as well as operations; consequently, the
Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA, would not have any functions left to
perform, except possibly minor ones in connection with the United
Kingdom and Iceland.21Since the decision on the Supreme Commander
had not yet been announced, Headquarters, ETOUSA, on 13 September,
tentatively confirmed the Civil Affairs Section as the final
channel of civil affairs authority in the theater with
responsibility for all phases of planning for civil affairs in
combined operations.22

The whole question was reopened in October when COSSAC revised
its approach to civil affairs. The country house organization had
been modeled on the Allied Military Government of Occupied
Territory (AMGOT) created for Italy, under which the military
governor was subordinate to the Supreme Commander, but AMGOT itself
was otherwise completely separate from the combat forces. Under the
AMGOT concept the country houses would each have evolved into civil
affairs headquarters, practically national military administrations
for their assigned countries;

[29]

but, except for Germany, the countries of western Europe would
be liberated, not occupied, and according to a decision of the
Quebec Conference in August, were to be returned to their native
governments as soon as possible. ANIGOT, moreover, after it went
into action in Italy in September, rapidly began to look like a
prize example of the fallacy of permitting two independent commands
in the same theater. Additionally, COSSAC soon realized that the
country houses would impose a tremendous drain on personnel. Each
would have a full staff of experts in all civil affairs fields,
virtual shadow governments for a half dozen or more countries.23

Although its demise would not be as complete as was then intended, the country
house era in COSSAC came to an end in late October. On the 13th, Col. Karl R.
Bendetsen became Chief Staff Officer (US) for Civil Affairs, COSSAC. With this
assignment, the American side of the Civil Affairs Section, COSSAC, and the
Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA, were separated. Until then Colonel Ryan had headed
both. En route to London, Bendetsen had spent five days in Washington. He said
later, he had spent the time reading reports, and no particular form of civil
affairs organization had been recommended to him.24 But it could hardly have been unknown to him that the Civil Affairs
Division, War Department, was not happy with the dual command channels AMGOT
had created, and within days after his arrival in the theater, Bendetsen began
dismantling the country houses. He gave as his reason the Supreme Commander's
need for a single compact staff that could deal in broad principles. He was
also concerned, he reported, about ETOUSA's place in civil affairs. If ETOUSA
received a civil affairs mission, he maintained, part of COSSAC's area planning
would obviously be useless.25

The projected abolition of the country houses brought with it
the first truly significant development in civil affairs doctrine
of the war. Civil affairs and military government finally achieved
integration into the operating military forces. Within COSSAC, the
change was described as being from a static, regional approach to a
mobile plan. In other words, civil affairs would move with the
combat troops and be part of the continuing operation, not just a
substitute for native government in liberated and occupied areas.26 Until then, considered in both civilian and military circles as
primarily a rear area and postwar activity, civil affairs would
find a place in the war itself.

The revised COSSAC concept of civil affairs for a few days seemed also to breathe
new life into ETOUSA's prospect of acquiring an operational civil affairs mission.
At the end of the month General Devers proposed that LOSS AC assume responsibility
for all combined planning and ETOUSA take responsibility for planning and the
conduct of civil affairs by US forces.27 What was not yet known by the theater was that at Quebec in August
the President and the Prime Minister had decided that the Supreme Commander
should be an American. By early November, with the Tehran Conference in the
offing, the naming of the Supreme Commander was becoming urgent, and his ap-

[30]

pointment would automatically finish off ETOUSA as an operational command.28 On 12 November the Civil Affairs Division (CAD) advised Devers that
COSSAC henceforth would speak with final authority on all civil affairs matters,
and the US side of COSSAC would be the War Department's channel of communication.
The Civil Affairs Section, ETOUSA, would be absorbed into the 1st (later 12th)
US 211 Army Group.
29

Although COSSAC; achieved a civil affairs planning capability
late and a clear mandate to do such planning even later, it had,
nevertheless, by the end of the year 1943 laid the foundations for
civil affairs in northwest Europe and for military government in
Germany. One major step was the decision already mentioned for a
mobile civil affairs organization. Another was the projected
division of the German territory to be occupied by the Western
Allies into a northwestern (British) zone and a southwestern
(American) zone, which aroused such prolonged controversy at so
high a level that it will have to be left. for discussion
elsewhere. The rest of COSSAC's work for the most part took the
form of single, often random-seeming decisions, lout ones necessary
to the construction of a coherent organization and plan. In each
instance the COSSAC staff was literally striking out into
unexplored territory.

In the last quarter of 1943 RANKIN C continued to be COSSAC's
main concern. Its object was conceived as being to occupy areas on
the Continent, particularly in Germany, from which the British and
American forces could enforce the terms of surrender. Of the
probable civil affairs tasks, the foremost seemed to be to maintain
law and order. A German surrender was scarcely conceivable without
also either a collapse or overthrow of the Nazi regime;
consequently, the country might be found to have very little in the
way of a functioning government or none at all. Additionally the
defeat could be expected to set off a massive movement of people as
the German troops still scattered across Europe from the North Cape
to Crete attempted to make their way home, as millions of prisoners
of war and displaced persons took to the roads out of Germany, and
possibly as the Germans themselves fled in panic from their most
feared enemy, the Russians. The economy, on the other hand, having
survived four years of war, was expected to be able to provide
adequately for the country after the surrender.30

Having postulated the conditions under which military government
in Germany might expect to operate, the COSSAC staff also undertook
to define its purpose. FM 27-5 had recommended benevolence toward
both friendly and enemy populations. In the COSSAC thinking a
sterner line emerged and with it the germ of what was to become a
fundamental assumption in all later planning for the occupation,
namely, that for the Germans hostilities would not necessarily end
when the shooting stopped. The purpose of military government in
Germany would be to assist the

[31]

military commander to impose his will on the enemy, and the
first concern would be to help maintain the striking power of the
military forces by controlling movements of people and by
preventing disease and disorder. Relief, an important function in
liberated Allied territory, would be restricted in Germany "to
those measures which the Supreme Allied Commander may specifically
direct to prevent a general breakdown of civil life and the spread
of disease."
31

The most difficult practical question RANKIN C raised was one of means. A German
surrender could create a sudden need for a full-blown civil affairs organization
to administer all of western Europe. The first proposal, in October 1943, was
to form a combined U.S.-British civil affairs military government force totaling
5,000 officers and enlisted men. A month later, as the RANKIN plan began to
take shape, the number was increased to 2,400 US officers, 5,000 US enlisted
men, 2,500 British officers, and 4,500 British of other ranks.32 The choice General Morgan then faced seemed to be either to call into
being so large a force and risk there being no assignments for it for months,
possibly even years, or to go ahead and draft plans which he knew he could not
execute. Fortunately, the choice was not quite as stark as it appeared. The
British contingent could be assembled at fairly short notice if RANKIN C were
to materialize suddenly. A British civil affairs school at Wimbledon had been
training officers since February 1943 and returning them to their original units
or to civilian life. They could be quickly recalled.33 The Americans were a different case. They and all their equipment would
have to be assembled in the United States and brought across the Atlantic. Morgan
saw no alternative but to accept the risk that they might have to be "kept
hanging about" for a long time as the price for having them at hand if
they were suddenly needed.34

On 5 October, General Devers alerted General Hilldring to the impending requirement
to ship the entire projected US civil affairs contingent to England.35The first arrivals could not be expected before January 1944, just barely
in time if a disastrous winter in Russia forced a German surrender. If not,
the US civil affairs personnel would have to wait and go back to school in England.
ETOUSA would make space available in the American Schools Center at Shrivenham,
sixty miles due west of London, which already housed a variety of other ETOUSA
schools ranging from cooking and baking to military intelligence. On 1 December,
Col. Cuthbert P. Steams, as commandant, activated the Civil Affairs Center at
Shrivenham. The Civil Affairs Center would be responsible not only for training
but for the entire US field organization for civil affairs in the European theater.36The first group of trainees, forty

In December 1943, with the announcement of General Eisenhower's
appointment as Supreme Commander, the COSSAC phase of combined
planning drew to a close. On the 13th COSSAC published what was to
be the most important document on civil affairs produced during its
tenure, the Standard Policy and Procedure for Combined Civil
Affairs Operations in Northwest Europe. Divided into three parts,
one dealing with nomenclature and organization and two with
operations in the field (on Allied and on enemy territory), the
Standard Policy and Procedure was designed to reconcile American
and British practices and policies as far as they were then known.
As such, it was mostly a routine compilation distinguishable only
by its subject matter from dozens of similar staff manuals. What
made it a civil affairs milestone was that it assigned full control
of and responsibility for civil affairs and military government to
the military commanders, from the Supreme Commander on down. In the
European theater, civil affairs was to have no existence separate
from the combat commands. In occupied enemy territory the Supreme
Commander would be the military governor and would delegate
appropriate authority to his subordinate commanders, who would then
bear the responsibility in their own areas. The chief object would
be to maintain conditions among the civilian population which would
at least not hinder military operations and if possible assist
them; and the task of the civil affairs staff's and detachments
would be to relieve the combat troops of civil commitments.
38